The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis, Essay Example

In the treasury of world literature one often confronts masterpieces characterized by such depth of meaning and variety of senses embedded into them that their analysis appears an intriguing and challenging undertaking which involves efforts of multiple researchers and eventually brings about a multitude of opinions and viewpoint among the latter. With such works of literature one can rank Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in The New England Magazine in 1892 and since then evoking an unquenchable interest of literary and art critics and wide public, as well as that of medical professionals.

The reasons for such attention may be seen in the variety of topics touched upon by the author in her concise piece of writing: issues from social to medical to cultural are inherent in the short story. The attempts to analyze and reveal the implications of “The Yellow Wallpaper” made by Marty Roth in her article “Gilman’s Arabesque Wallpaper” have lead the author to viewing the story in a broad socio-political context of its time, including the attitude to wallpaper as such and to its design and the meaning of latter in Western culture. Though such position aims at an intricate research of the deepest layers of meaning, it appears that Roth in her analysis digresses from the key message of Gilman’s short story which is viewed as a feministic revelation of the nineteenth-century women social treatment.

Positioning ‘wallpaper’ as the focal point of her study Marty Roth claims that the female narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an embodiment of “the dominant American subjectivity” in terms of reaction and attitude to the exotic trends and influences brought from the East. Regarding wallpaper, that subjectivity is realized in two main ways: firstly, as an opposition between the designer trends of the time, introducing wallpaper as a novelty for home decoration, and the medical science that disputed wallpaper as an unhealthy and unsanitary idea; and secondly, as the general attitude of scepticism, caution and even repulsion towards such generally accepted concepts of the Eastern culture as its indeterminacy, mysticism, and inspiration driven from drugs (Roth).

However, if one turns to the more widely-discussed feminist aesthetics of the story, then the wallpaper appears as a symbol of domestic and social prison that does not let the woman to realize her full potential. The nameless female narrator one recognizes an image of a Victorian woman, whose role was typically that of a domestic ghost without any significant role in social or political life of the time. The illusory wallpaper woman behind the bars seen by the narrator is therefore the embodiment of that oppressed woman. Her eventual liberation (as well as the narrator’s freedom of action) can be viewed as a symbol of female emancipation: “I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 10).

An artistic means repeatedly cited in multiple works of realist fiction as “distasteful” (Roth quotes such masters as Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky), the yellow wallpaper indeed appears to dominate Gilman’s short story, determining the development of the narrator’s state of mind and attitude from the very beginning to the very end. Tracing the narrator’s view of the wallpaper, one gets the impression of total disorder and confusion in the pattern:

“…repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow. […] I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 2); “It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman 7); “…by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, […] that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. […] The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.” (Gilman 6)

Roth traces the Oriental roots and reasons for such messy distribution of motives, and finds the irritation produced by them in Western psychology and mindset that did not accept any disorder trying to find system in the most confused arrangement:

“I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of I radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.” (Gilman 4); “Round and round and round — round and round and round — it makes me dizzy! […] nobody could climb through that pattern — it strangles…” (Gilman 7)

Following the feministic point of view, it occurs that the strangling design of the wallpaper is in fact the reflection of social laws, rules and guidelines which a woman of that time had to follow in order to meet the expectations of her environment. In her attempt to understand the pattern the narrator of the story actually undertakes to understand the social obstacles that suffocate her and prevent from ‘coming free’, i.e. from leading an independent existence.

No wonder that her husband, John, repeatedly admonishes her not to think, not to give way to any ideas that might disturb her: “He says […] that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me” (Gilman 5). In fact, he prefers her to sit quietly behind the social bars and never to discover the truth about the confinement to which she has been doomed. John can feel that his wife pursues the objective of searching for some kind of revelation: “I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (Gilman 4).

As Roth notes, the effects of such arabesque pattern observed by medicine science were far from positive. Doctors stated that in times of mental disturbance patients who were surrounded by an “endless multiplication and monotony of strongly-marked patterns” were prone to experiencing dizziness, annoyance, and emotional defeat. The narrator herself complains that she gets “positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness” (Gilman 3). From the feministic position, however, such negative effects are not medical conditions but rather the irritated state of a mind which is lead astray by multiple social conventions of the time, quite illogical in terms of equality of female and male rights. Possessing a vivid thinking and a desire to understand the reality around her, the narrator comes to the conclusion that there should be an escape for the woman behind the bars: “The front pattern does move — and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 7).

There is yet another fact that evidences the feministic orientation of the story. Being deprived of any possible means of self-expression, the wife has to resort to the last possibility of self-actualization by secretly writing an account of her ideas. The idea of taking up an occupation as a means of distracting from daily loneliness which she suffers as a result of John’s busy career is not even discussed; even the baby is taken away from the mother. Her living environment is limited to the yellow-papered nursery and short walks in the garden, and even occasional fantasies, the only retreat of a bored mind, are suppressed immediately under the pretext of causing nervous weakness to the wife. At first she silently obeys, but even in that obedience she feels the urge for self-expression: “I know John would think it absurd. But must say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief!” (Gilman 4).

The need and right of every human being to self-actualization become evident; and in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the author lets her character find an escape from the mental and emotional vacuum she is kept in. In the final scene John falls down seeing his wife creep around the room; in this creeping she imitates the behaviour of the woman who has freed herself from the strangling design of the wallpaper. Having liberated herself, the woman notices the weakness of her husband in the face of her freedom, but she does not care any more and continues with her deliberate action easily overcoming him as an obstacle on her way: “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (Gilman 10).

In the world of art and literature, true masterpieces are marked by such depth of sense that can be studied eternally and viewed from a multitude of positions; however, one should not overlook the main idea that dominates the work. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” it is the message of feminism, the necessity for respect and acknowledgement of female personality and right for self-realization. Charlotte Gilman shows the malignancy of any social restrictions for the woman, as once she has freed from them, she neglects her former prisoners the way they once overlooked her personality. By this Gilman sends a warning against any kind of social oppression and constraint, as the consequences of such may be destructive.

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte P. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston, MA: Small & Maynard, 1899.
10 Nov. 2009. <http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf>

Roth, Marty. “Gilman’s Arabesque Wallpaper.” Mosaic (Winnipeg). 34.4 (Dec. 2001): p145. Literature Resource Center. Gale. VCCS System — used for scripted access. 8 Nov. 2009. <http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=viva2_vccs>